Wade Mainer died last week. He was 104 years old. Born when Theodore Roosevelt was president and only four years after the Wright Brothers first flew, he was already preparing to vote for the first time when sound came to movies, Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and Babe Ruth hit 60 homers. He was only 22 when the first Great Depression fell… but things actually didn’t change much in the hard-scrapple hills of Buncombe County, North Carolina, where he was reared.
But Wade was not notable because he lived longer than is allotted to most of us. Among his plaudits is the fact that he followed his brother J E Mainer into playing music. J E was a fiddle player; Wade got interested in the banjo, which then, in black and white rural Southern music, was strummed (or played “claw hammer” style). Wade experimented, following his own curiosity and taste, and started plucking the strings. He used only two fingers – his own style.
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